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Renowned Jamaican-born photojournalist dies on Ebola assignment in Liberia

A renowned Jamaican born photojournalist and three time Pulitzer Prize winner died recently on an Ebola assignment in Liberia.

According to The Washington Post, Michel du Cille collapsed while returning on foot from a village in the Salala district of Liberia’s Bong County, where he had been working on a project. He was transported over dirt roads to a hospital two hours away but was declared dead on arrival of an apparent heart attack.

Mr. du Cille won two Pulitzer Prizes for photography with the Miami Herald in the 1980s and joined The Post in 1988. In 2008, he shared his third Pulitzer, for public service, with Post reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull, for an investigative series on the treatment of veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

His assignments often took him to places of strife and deprivation, from Sudan to Afghanistan, where he came under fire in 2013. He covered civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s before returning to west Africa this year to cover the Ebola outbreak.

  

In Liberia, Mr. du Cille wore full-body protective gear and operated his cameras through heavy rubber gloves. He photographed the stricken patients, but he also managed to convey the emotional toll of the disease on victims’ families.

He was born in 1956 in Kingston, and moved with his family to the state of Georgia in the 1970s, where he began his career as a photographer at the Gainesville Times. He graduated from Indiana University in 1981 and received a master’s degree in journalism from Ohio University in 1994.

Source: The Washington Post

Jamaican journalist dies in Liberia
Washington Post photojournalist Michel du Cille, seen while on assignment covering the Ebola crisis in Liberia.- Source: nppa.org

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